


checkmate

by callmefairyofthesea



Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series)
Genre: Canon Continuation, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Light Angst, Team as Family, Time Travel, but I thought some of you who read "no man is an island" might be interested, our boy's just chilling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29703717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmefairyofthesea/pseuds/callmefairyofthesea
Summary: Thrown three years into the past, Gar sits with his memories and tries not to forget. A one-shot set in the same universe as "no man is an island."
Relationships: Beast Boy/Raven, Garfield Logan/Raven
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	checkmate

**Author's Note:**

> Hey hey! Welcome to a brief exploration of future Gar in the past. I didn’t want to write a long-form story about it because. Well. Future Gar is a lot less insecure, a fair bit more mature, and fully aware that everything works out. So he’s just chillin’.

Gar’s memories are fading.

Not all at once, not so fast or unsubtle that the timestream has shucked his mind out like an oyster.

But enough that he notices. Every morning that he wakes up in his long-gone bunkbed, to the scratched G+G initials in the wooden frame overhead, he has to grasp at the tail end of nostalgia and details before they slip through his fingers like the slick stream of a water hose and disappear forever to soaked-up dirt. He doesn’t know what to do about it.

Three years ago, in the aftermath of the apocalypse, there is no one who can help him remember. No one else who can remind him of the color of the dangling lanterns on New Azarath, the name of the renovated coffee shop on something-something street, the dogs at the shelter he volunteers at. Volunteered at. Will volunteer at. And as the specifics shimmy away, he thinks he’s losing himself.

On his fourth night here, as he rubs out the kinks in his muscle from his cells vibrating together, Gar knows his memories don’t feel quite right. As if overthinking the sequence of events has turned everything hazy with doubt, and he starts to think he’ll forget the color of the sky if he doesn’t look out the window. He needs Vic to remind him how Wicked Scary V ended. He needs Kori to promise that Black Mamba’s will open up at the mall next spring. He needs Raven to confirm what they did for her twenty-first birthday because all he has left is flashes of her holo-ring and chai-flavored kisses. Which has nothing to do with alcohol because Raven doesn’t drink, probably, definitely. He thinks he still remembers that much.

“You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” Vic asks at some point in the Med-Bay, running another vital check with electrodes glued to green skin, as if this does anything to help Gar hold onto their real names and futures. “If Raven’s going to erase our memories of this anyway…”

“It’s not fair to dump everything on you. Future team has some pretty messed-up memories.”

“Get your head out of your ass,” says Dick on the roof during training. “You don’t need to lone-hero us.”

In the kitchen, watching Gar stir onions over the stove, Kori holds Silkie tight to her chest. “We can remember your stories for you. And tell them to you when you forget.”

And when Raven slides him a mug of hot black tea with amped-up sugar and milk, one eyebrow raised, Gar realizes this suffering-in-silence thing is unnecessarily one-sided.

So he caves.

Gar talks over dinners together, leaking as many details as he can, hoping that five people can soak them up better than his timestream-scrambled brain. He confesses their secret identities because he refuses to lose them, confesses Galfore and Ryand’r too early, the summer they spent on Tamaran, the Azarathian refuge they rebuilt in another dimension. Plotlines. Simple hooks. War stories that sound good over soup and salad.

“My brother is alive,” says Kori too quietly, and Gar has to tell her he’s okay, that he will _be_ okay as long as she waits until the summer after the Brotherhood, as long as she waits for Blackfire to track him down. And that pulls them both up short, Kori because she tries to avoid talking about her sister, Gar because he sort of misses her terribleness. Which is not something he has thought often before, so he switches gears and tells them that their Gar is okay too. That he’s hanging just fine in the future, that his Raven will roll the spell out right and fix everything soon.

“When?” Dick demands, still flipping through old news clippings about Warp at the table, barely touching his soup. Which is just like him, really, but Gar remembers that hospital trip. How young Dick looked in long IV lines, his heart rate monitor beeping too fast, the League doctors exchanging looks because they have seen it too often, in this field of work.

So he says, “February twenty-first. Nothing to do but wait.” And then drags Dick off to the gym because hand-to-hand combat is better than research all-nighters, better than letting him wreck his blood pressure with stress.

But even that memory fades when he tries to sit with it, when he warns Dick, pinned to the ground with his arms behind his back, that he needs to take it easy before he runs his body into the ground. Acrobats and gymnasts have short professional lives, he reminds him.

Heroes’ lives are shorter.

Over breakfast Gar picks lighter stories to tell them, inspired by all the eye bags that means no one has been sleeping. Stories about Melvin on her first roller coaster, Timmy and Teether tiptoeing over the height restrictions, sunburnt cheeks, loose flip flops. Stories about his professors and the quiet ways they have accepted his double life, even when his email excuses run dry. Stories about Silkie eating his metaphysics paper, stories about Kori staying up with him all night to rewrite it, quoting philosophers who never lived on Earth.

As the team moves on with their lives, public events and parties to apologize for the aftermath of Trigon and to promote mental health, Gar tags along. Squishes his body back down to five foot six and laughs at Vic’s mouth hung open. He likes schmoozing with the mayor, rich donors, likes picking up a new three-piece suit and pretending that Raven stares. He loves her regardless of where they are in time. Even if he misses the shape of her thoughts against his, slumped up inside him like a winter duvet.

“Always knew you loved her,” says Vic too early in the morning, passing back the crinkled bag of tortilla chips, scraping the salsa bowl across the coffee table. The TV flickers with one of Rita’s old movies, and even though the pixels are blurry, Gar likes the music because it reminds him of days when the Doom Patrol wasn’t so bad. “Just didn’t know you were _in_ love with her.”

“Yeah,” he laughs, fingers tapping the couch cushions to parody the piano. He realizes he has been talking about Raven for the better part of an hour, spilling out the memories he doesn’t want to forget, and he misses the cling of her hands. How she is not touchy-feely, not like him, but her fingers are tattle tales. They reach out like dowsing rods, always knotting into his hair, his palms, the slope of his ears. How she will be turned away from him, flipping through her textbooks, but her pinky will link with his as if to say hello.

Vic hums along to his stories, and Gar loves that he takes things in stride. That he can string out spoilers like popcorn threads, and Vic will hang them on the bannisters, no questions asked.

When Gar burns himself out on stories of Raven, he turns over to memories with Vic. Afternoons playing frisbee in the park, Sara Simms and ten kids waving with a mix of wheelchairs and prosthetic arms and invisible disabilities. Stories of STAR Labs and Silas Stone, flower bouquets on a tombstone that’s not that old while they waved Vic’s college degree and cried.

“STAR Labs, huh,” says Vic, but Gar reassures him no. That he’s making important things, _good_ things, aids and accessibility and cost-efficient futures.

But Vic gets stiff, the way he sometimes does when he needs longer to think through it all, and they end up playing MegaMonkey Racers instead. Not talking, but they’ve lived together so long that it’s okay to run out of things to say.

Sometimes Gar wanders the halls, searching for nooks that don’t exist yet, hallways that haven’t been built. At night, when he stares at the bottom of the top bunkbed, he folds up his memories of Garth and sea salt. Hangs on to the smell of the ocean because scents are good for remembering. He spends Wednesday as a starfish.

“Do you have any stories about me?” Raven asks one night, after Gar has shouldered his way into the research room and yelled Dick to bed. The tables are full of wrinkled documents, open spell books, sheets of complicated physics equations. After years of loving them, Gar knows how to edit his assumptions. Knows that this doesn’t mean they don’t trust him and his promise that the future team will figure it out for them. Only means that they don’t relax the way most people do.

“I’ve told you tons of stories,” he snorts, shoving a chessboard forward. Because they’re both half-nocturnal, because he knows she won’t go to bed.

“About New Azarath,” she hums, sliding a pawn forward. She doesn’t bother asking when he learned to play. “Not about me.”

“I told you about Melvin and Timmy and Teether.”

He doesn’t know why he’s resisting. In most of a week, his body dying, his mind expunged of all the memories that make him whole, Gar thinks lying to her hurts the most. He hates pulling his hands back from her hair, her shoulders, her waist, trying not to bump her in the kitchen, trying not to flood her with his emotions when she’s still new to feeling. Every night he falls asleep with a gaping hole where Raven should be, will be, was, wishing he could ramble everything out. Tell her what they mean to each other, the memories they have lived through, and he clings to her friendship because even if it’s not romantic, it’s more than enough to keep him sane.

He loses his bishop to her knight.

“Then tell me about Terra,” says Raven, moving her queen.

Gar’s hand freezes over the chessboard. “What?”

“I noticed you leave the Tower at night,” she confesses, and of course she did. Of course she noticed the hesitations in his stories, found the unspoken name he refused to admit. “I was worried, so I followed you to the cave. Her statue is gone.”

Gar tenses his shoulders. Swallows down Tara’s foster parents’ address because he can’t do that to her. Not yet, not when he promised to give her time. “She’s alive. And happy.”

“She’s on the team?”

“You asked her to come back.”

Raven has a slight scoff of denial, and so Gar dares to tell her stories about caves and hiking. That July the team went to the Grand Canyon and how Tara almost refused to leave, how she pitched her tent and slept beneath the stretched-out stars. Stories about fireflies and porch steps, broken hearts on the edge of golden cliffs. As he talks, he lets his mental walls slide down so she can taste the color of his memories. He wants her to breathe them in like fresh air, feel all the words that he doesn’t know how to say.

“It’s a lot to forgive,” Raven says slowly, rolling the syllables out, putting his king in check.

“It’s a lot of time to forgive.”

Raven considers him, tilts her head ever so slightly. Nods once. Twice. “Any more stories?”

He tells her about the Brotherhood because he’s weak. Tells her about the campfires and motels and the cold pit in his gut every time Dick called, every time another Titan went missing. He tells her about their not-date in the coffee shop and about Rita, Cliff, and Larry. He skirts around Steve, and she lets him.

“I’d like to meet them someday.”

“You will,” he says, telling her about college classes and sunlight funneled through ferns and glass windows. About the construction Jinx let them do on the walls, the topsy-turvy story that is Jinx. And eventually, after he talks around their love story in October, he says, “I’m sorry you won’t get to remember this.”

But she looks through her lashes at him and offers a rare smile. The kind that makes her eyes small and her cheeks round. “It’s okay.”

Because even if he talked around it, Raven has her magic on his pulse, and he can see that she knows. Can see the hesitation in her throat as she tries to find the right thing to say and settles with sliding their fingers together. As though she knows how much he has missed it.

“We’re not going to talk about it?” he asks, too weak to slide his mental walls back up. Too lost in the familiarity of woodsmoke and lavender static.

And she shakes her head, moving her rook across the chessboard, cornering him into waiting three years the hard way.

“Checkmate.”

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: Black Mamba’s is the store in "no man is an island" where Kori and Gar go shopping in chapter fifteen and buy the seagull print sweater and crocodile overalls. I originally had a whole chapter about it, but it got cut in revisions.
> 
> Also fun fact: Jinx goes into the landlord business in this universe after she leaves the HIVE. She specializes in housing for superheroes (discrete, fortified, extra security measures, training gyms, etc.). She’s the mysterious “Jay” that Tara mentions in chapter five of “no man is an island.”
> 
> Last fun fact: I have headcanons for three complete arcs between the end of season five and the start of “no man is an island.” Sixth season revolves around Kori finding her brother, reconnecting with Komand’r, and helping Tamaran transition leaders after Galfore’s death. Seventh season is building New Azarath for any monks who survived Trigon’s attack in season four. This is also where I imagine Raven’s seven demon brothers from the comics are introduced. Eighth season has Dick returning to Gotham to help a new Robin transition and introduce Nightwing. There’s also probably some angsty stuff with Jason being Red-X. Not planning on writing these in long-form stories, but. If anyone was curious. That’s my basis for how-the-Titans-have-changed-since-the-end-of-the-show-and-before-no-man-is-an-island.
> 
> Come yell at me in the comments!


End file.
